The ticket is for this train and no other. He knew it, but anxiety got the best of him: like an intruder, it usurped the movement of his hands, accelerated the beating of his heart, and pressed against his chest, lodging like a parasite inside the empty shell of his previous existence. In his heart, he no longer believes he can ever go back. Who’ll undo what has been done, raise what’s fallen, restore what’s turned to ashes and smoke? Would the human flesh rotting beneath the ground rise up if the trumpets of the resurrection were to sound? Who’ll erase the words, spoken and written, that sought to legitimize the crime and make it seem not only respectable and heroic but necessary? Who’ll open the door no one is knocking on now, pleading for refuge? Sounds travel at a perceptible though infinitesimally slow rate between his ear and the circuits in his brain where words are deciphered. He sits down again, breathing deeply, his face against the window, looking at the subterranean platform, a stab of pain near his heart, trying to calm down, waiting. In his mind two clocks show two different times, like two discordant pulsations he might detect by pressing two different points on his body. It’s four in the afternoon and it’s ten at night. In Madrid it’s been dark for several hours, and only the dim light of a few street lamps, the globes painted blue, can be seen in the deserted streets. Sometimes the headlights of a car driving at top speed emerge from around a corner, the tires screeching against the paving stones, mattresses tied haphazardly to the roof as an absurd protection, acronyms scrawled with a paintbrush on the side panels, a rifle protruding from the window, perhaps the ghostly face of someone whose hands are tied, who knows he is on the way to his death. (They didn’t bother to tie his legs; he was so docile they probably didn’t think it was necessary.) In the house in the Sierra where his children may still be living, they can hear in the darkness the dry thump of the pendulum and the mechanism of a clock that always runs slow. In the Sierra de Guadarrama the nights are cold now and the smell of damp rotting leaves and pine needles rises from the earth. Over the dark city, on the first clear nights of autumn just a few weeks earlier, the sky recovered its forgotten splendor, the powerful radiance of the Milky Way, which revived old fears from his childhood nested in the memories of a Madrid that predated electricity and the endless streams of headlights running down the streets. With the war, darkness returned to the city along with the night terrors of children’s folktales. As a boy, he’d wake up in his tiny room in the porter’s lodging and stare at faint yellow gaslights from the small barred window at the height of the sidewalk. He would listen to the footsteps and the pounding of the metal tip of the night watchman’s pike on the paving stones, his slow, frightening steps like the steps of the bogeyman himself. Many years later, in a darkened Madrid, footsteps and pounding were once again emissaries of panic: the elevator noises in the middle of the night, the heels of boots in the hallway, rifle butts banging on the door, resounding inside one’s chest to the accelerated rhythm of one’s heart, as if two hearts were beating simultaneously. Ignacio, for the sake of all you love best, open the door, they’re going to kill me. Now the train is really moving, but slowly, with powerful majesty and the vigor of its electric locomotive, granting intact the happiness of every journey’s start: perfect absolution for the next two hours when nothing unforeseen can happen. A brief future with no potential surprises on the horizon is a gift he’s learned to appreciate in recent months. He felt the same way, only more so, in the port of Saint-Nazaire when the SS Manhattan pulled away from the pier, the deep howling of the siren in the air, the engine’s vibration rattling the metal beneath his feet and the railing where he rested his hands as if on the metal of a balcony on a high floor. When he looked down at the shrinking figures waving handkerchiefs on the dock, he felt not the simple joy of having escaped, of actually leaving for America after so many delays, so many days in that state of fear and anxiety, but the suspension of the immediate past and the near future because he had before him six or seven days to live in the present without having to confront anything, fear anything, decide anything. That was all he wanted, to stretch out on a hammock on deck, his eyes closed and his mind clear of all thought, as smooth and empty as the ocean’s horizon.
He was a passenger like any other in second class, still relatively well dressed, though carrying only one small suitcase made him somewhat unusual. Was a person traveling so far with so little luggage completely respectable? You may encounter problems at the border no matter how many documents you show, Negrín had warned him on the eve of his departure, with sad sarcasm, his face swollen from exhaustion and lack of sleep, so you’re better off not carrying much luggage in case you have to cross to France over the mountains. You know very well that in our country nothing’s certain anymore. As the ship left the pier, the war’s stigmas were left behind, the pestilence of Europe, at least for the time being, faded from his memory as water dissolves writing and leaves only blurred stains on blank paper. In a way, the war had reached the French border, the cafés and cheap hotels where Spaniards met, like sick people brought together by the shame of a vile infection that when shared perhaps seemed less monstrous. Spaniards fleeing from one side or the other, in transit to who knows where, or appointed more or less officially to dubious missions in Paris, which in some cases allowed them to handle unusual sums of money — to buy weapons, to arrange for newspapers to publish reports favorable to the Republican cause — grouped around a radio trying to decipher news bulletins that mentioned the names of public figures or places in Spain, waiting for the afternoon papers in which the word “Madrid” would appear in a headline, but almost never on the front page. They had stormy arguments, slamming their fists on marble-topped tables and waving their hands through the clouds of cigarette smoke, rejecting the city where they found themselves, as if they were in a café on Calle de Alcalá or the Puerta del Sol and what lay before their eyes didn’t interest them in the least, the prosperous, radiant city without fear where their obsessive war didn’t exist, where they themselves were nothing, foreigners similar to others who talked louder and had darker hair, darker faces, gruffer voices, and the harsh gutturals of a Balkan dialect. On the two nights he had to spend in a Paris hotel, waiting to have his transit visa and ticket to America confirmed, Ignacio Abel did his best not to run into anyone he knew. It was rumored that Bergamín was in Paris on an obscure cultural venture that perhaps disguised a mission to buy weapons or recruit foreign volunteers. But Bergamín was probably in a better hotel. The one where Ignacio Abel stayed, with a profound feeling of distaste, was largely populated by prostitutes and foreigners, the various castoffs of Europe, among whom the Spaniards preserved their noisy national distinction, intensely singular and at the same time resembling the others, those who’d left their countries long before and those who had no country to go back to, the stateless, carrying Nansen passports from the League of Nations, not allowed to stay in France but also not admitted to any other country: German Jews, Romanians, Hungarians, Italian anti-Fascists, Russians languidly resigned to exile or furiously arguing about their increasingly phantasmagorical country, each with his own language and his own particular manner of speaking bad French, all united by the identical air of their foreignness, documents that didn’t guarantee much and bureaucratic decisions always delayed, the hostility of hotel employees and the violent searches by the police. With his passport in order and his American visa, with his ticket for the SS Manhattan, Ignacio Abel had eluded the fate of those wandering souls, whom he would pass in the narrow hallway to the toilet or hear groaning or murmuring in their equally foreign languages on the other side of his room’s thin wall. Professor Rossman could have been one of them if, on his return from Moscow in the spring of 1935, he’d remained with his daughter in Paris instead of trying his luck at the Spanish embassy, where the clerks in charge of residency permits had seemed more benevolent or indifferent or venal than the French. At times during those days in Paris, Ignacio Abel thought he saw Professor Rossman in the distance, his arms around a large black briefcase, or holding the arm of his daughter, who was taller than he, as if he’d continued to have a parallel existence not canceled by the other, the one that took him to Madrid and nomadic penury, gradual loss of dignity, then the morgue. If Professor Rossman had remained in Paris, he’d be living now in one of these hotels, visiting embassies and consular offices, persistent and meek, always smiling and removing his hat when he approached a clerk’s window, waiting for a visa to the United States or Cuba or any country in South America, pretending not to understand when a bureaucrat or shopkeeper called him sale boche, sale métèque behind his back.